Research screens for drugs that will help patients with MND

Research screens for drugs that will help patients
with MND June 20, 2014

Potentially
ground-breaking new research into how different drugs can
alter the development of Motor Neurone Disease is underway
at the University of Auckland’s Centre for Brain Research.

The drug discovery project follows the arrival of Dr Emma
Scotter from King’s College London to take up the Aotearoa
Post-Doctoral Fellowship at the Centre for Brain Research at
the University of Auckland, with Professors Mike Dragunow
and Margaret Brimble. Dr Scotter will lead research into
around 4000 different drugs to see if any of the compounds
can influence, or change, the development of Motor Neurone
Disease in patient brain cells.

Motor Neurone Disease
(MND) is a neurodegenerative disease in which the nerve
cells, or neurones, controlling the muscles that enable us
to move, speak, swallow and breathe slowly undergo
degeneration and die. There are around 300 people in New
Zealand with this fatal disease.

MND Association
President Beth Watson has welcomed the opportunity to
highlight this vital research on the eve of MND Global
Awareness Day on June 21. “If we’re going to make a
difference to people’s lives with MND we need research
like this, so we can better understand the factors that
cause it and ultimately find a cure.

“It’s a really
exciting project and we’re lucky to have the likes of Dr
Scotter and MND Patron and head of the Centre for Brain
Research Professor Richard Faull working on MND research in
New Zealand.”

Dr Scotter, who worked with fellow Kiwi
MND expert Professor Chris Shaw in his King’s College
London laboratory before returning to Auckland’s Centre
for Brain Research this year, is excited about the project.
She says it brings together unique factors that will not
only help better understand MND but may even find a drug
that can help cure the disease.

“The first is working
with a world-leading biobank, established and run by
Professor Mike Dragunow with a $1 million philanthropic
donation from the Hugh Green Foundation, which grows cells
from the brains of patients who had MND,” Dr Scotter says.
“Those cells have the same genetic code, and were exposed
to the same environment, that the patient with MND had.”

“What we really want to do from here is to screen for
drugs that will eventually help patients with MND.”

Dr
Scotter, working with biobank staff, will use these
specially cultivated cells – cells which normally surround
blood vessels in the brain and which control blood supply
and inflammatory signals to the nerve cells affected in MND
- to test their response to more than 4000 different drugs.
These drugs have been obtained from two large drug
libraries, one containing manufactured compounds and the
second derived from natural products, the result of a
project led by the University of Auckland’s Professor
Margaret Brimble. Dr Scotter will also work closely with her
former colleagues at King’s College London.

The research
project takes New Zealand’s MND research to an exciting
new phase. “The best outcome would be to find that one of
these 4000 different drugs could actually alter or slow the
effects of MND in patient brain cells.” No-matter what
the outcome however, the team will certainly learn a lot
more about cell functions which are affected by MND and
contribute to the increasing understanding of this disease.

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